film

film - Steal This Film

Photograph by Ken Lundon Flickr.

Alleged aims included the application of pressure to Swedish police into conducting a search and seizure against Swedish law for film Steal This Film the purpose of disrupting The Pirate Bay s BitTorrent tracker. The Guardian s James Flint called it at heart a film traditionally-structured talking heads documentary with amusing stylings from film-makers who practice what they preach. Material found in Steal This Film includes the music of Can, tracks Thief and She Brings the film 3-D film Rain ; clips from other documentary interviews with industry and governmental officials; several industry anti-piracy promotionals; logos from several major Hollywood studios, and sequences from The Day After Tomorrow, The Matrix, Zabriskie Point, and They Live. The documentary asks How will society change and states This is the Future - And it has nothing to do with your bank balance . A special edition (also known as 2.5 ) was released to coincide with the trial in 2009 of The Pirate Bay.

Another condition given by the Committee was that an anti-piracy spokesperson be present to balance the debate. The documentary was officially released on filesharing networks on December 28, 2007 and, according to the filmmakers, downloaded 150,000 times in the first three days of distribution. Like Part One, Part Two is in Swedish. This has fundamental implications for market-based media companies.

Amongst others it has been shown on History Channel Spain, Canal + Poland, Noga Israel, TV4 Sweden and Dublin Community TV, Ireland. The film is taught in Universities on media courses worldwide, including NYU s Media Culture & Communication course. The film is famous partly for being one of the most downloaded documentaries to date. Estimates of the total current downloads of the film hover at around the 6 million mark via bittorrent alone.

Steal This Film is a film series documenting the movement against intellectual property produced by The League of Noble Peers and released via the BitTorrent peer-to-peer protocol. Two parts, and one special The Pirate Bay trial edition of the first part, have been released so far, and The League of Noble Peers is working on Steal this Film - The Movie and a new project entitled The Oil of the 21st Century . Part One, shot in Sweden and released in August 2006, combines accounts from prominent players in the Swedish piracy culture (The Pirate Bay, Piratbyrån, and the Pirate Party) with found material, propaganda-like slogans and Vox Pops. It includes interviews with The Pirate Bay members Fredrik Neij (tiamo), Gottfrid Svartholm (anakata) and Peter Sunde (brokep) that were later re-used by agreement in the documentary film Good Copy Bad Copy, as well as with Piratbyrån members Rasmus Fleischer (rsms), Johan (krignell) and Sara Andersson (fraux). The film attempt performed by the Hollywood film lobby to leverage economic sanctions by the United States government on Sweden through the WTO. One high-definition, full-length copy is available for online viewing on the popular video-sharing website YouTube. The new edition of Steal This Film is in part of the Official Selection and in competition at the 2009 Roma Fiction Festival (Factual strand). Steal This Film was selected for the Sheffield International Documentary Film Festival 2008, and was a semi-finalist in online video-streaming site Babelgum s 2008 competition.

This produced millions of downloads for the film and catapulted it to wide recognition on the Internet after it hit Digg, Slashdot, Reddit and other online centers of attention. Steal This Film (Part 2) was distributed in a similar manner, but with more trackers and indexes involved, including Isohunt and Mininova. Despite the principles of the seminar itself (organised via public wiki in a year-long process), the involvement of Piratbyran caused controversy with the funders of the seminar, the Swedish Arts Grants Committee, who refused to allow Piratbyran s logo on the seminar marketing materials alongside its own.

Since the creators have not attempted to restrict copying, the film is also available on YouTube, Google Video and many other web-based video service. A cam version leaked soon after the premiere of Steal This Film (Part 2) in Berlin. However, unlike Part One, which only had subtitles in English, Part Two has subtitles in many languages due to great interest in the documentary by volunteer translators.

Steal This Film Spectrial Edition is widely available online and it is thought to be this version that is now available to television stations and others. Part 2 draws parallels between the impact of the printing press and the internet in terms of making information accessible beyond a privileged group or controllers .

This version includes material from Steal This Film I and II combined with some new material shot with Peter Sunde and others during 2008. The seminar initiators solution was to add a black sticker dot over the logo, which was easily peeled off.

Adding to this the internet turns consumers into producers, by way of consumer generated content, leading to the sharing, mashup and creation of content not motivated by financial gains. The use of these short clips is believed to constitute fair use. Steal This Film (Part 2) Thematically, Part 2 examines the technological and cultural aspects of the copyright wars, and the cultural and economic implications of the internet.

The film has subtitles in Croatian, Danish, Dutch, French, Finnish, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish and Ukrainian. As well as funding from BritDoc, the Steal This Film producers continues to utilize a loose version of the Street Performer Protocol The League of Noble Peers asked for donations and more than US$30,000 has been received as of July 5, 2009. The argument is made that the decentralised nature of the internet makes the enforcement of conventional copyright impossible.

It includes an exploration of Mark Getty s infamous statement that intellectual property is the oil of the 21st century . The filmmakers report that roughly one in a thousand viewers are donating, mostly in the range USD $15-40. Steal This Film One and Two are credited as conceived, directed, and produced by The League of Noble Peers.

Part One was released through an arrangement with The Pirate Bay; the filesharing site marketed Steal This Film in place of its own pirate ship logo. Where Part One contains no personal attribution, Part Two has full credits. The League of Noble Peers are now working on a cinema release of Steal This Film. .